"High Turnout Is Seen in West Virginia Primary"
www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13...ocrats.html
By JULIE BOSMAN and JIM RUTENBERG
Published: May 13, 2008

Party officials predicted high turnout for West Virginia’s Democratic primary on Tuesday despite the widespread belief that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton would score an easy victory.

Tom Vogel, the executive director of the West Virginia Democratic Party, said on Tuesday that early voting was twice as heavy as in previous elections. More than 45,000 people cast their ballots early.

“So that’s a very positive sign,” Mr. Vogel said, adding that good weather across the state should also help generate a high turnout. “It’s a little cool, but we’ve got sunshine and no bad weather. We expect a very good turnout.”

Polls opened at 6:30 a.m. at the state’s 1,965 precincts, and are to remain open until 7:30 p.m.

Jason Williams, the manager of the elections division at the West Virginia Secretary of State’s office, said the turnout in the 2004 primary election was 39 percent of registered voters. This year, he expects turnout to reach between 50 and 60 percent.

“So far, most of the county clerks are reporting an average turnout for the primary, but we anticipate a surge early in the day as people are coming home from work,” he said. “And with early voting so high, we do anticipate that to translate into higher turnout throughout the day.”

Senator Barack Obama, expecting a shellacking on Tuesday, is ramping up his effort to behave like a general election candidate with a visit to Cape Girardeau, in the potential swing state of Missouri, for a town hall meeting later in the day.

Cape Girardeau is where the radio host Rush Limbaugh was born and started his on-air career, and it went overwhelmingly for George W. Bush in 2004. But it is the sort of place where the Democrats want to try to compete this year, and where Mr. Obama’s campaign believes it can pick up some disaffected Republicans and independents.

“We think there are voters there who are desperately interested in changing Washington, they have an independent streak in them and we have a chance to pick up some votes,” said Bill Burton, a spokesman for Mr. Obama.

The Republican Party, which has been increasingly treating Mr. Obama as the presumptive Democratic nominee, engaged in an exercise of what political professionals call “bracketing” — the dispatching of local officials before and after an opponent’s visit. In an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published on Tuesday — and blasted out by the RNC — former Senator John C. Danforth of Missouri offered a multi-pronged critique of Mr. Obama, saying, for instance, that his plan for Iraq would send a message that “Americans can get pushed around by terrorists.”

In a conference call with reporters, local Republican leaders continued the offensive.

“He will not resonate with Missourians, he’s a tax-raising liberal,” said Doug Russell, the chairman of the state Republican Party.

The Lieutenant Gov. Peter Kinder called him, “the hardest left candidate ever nominated for president of the United States.”

But Mr. Obama’s campaign seemed to welcome the fight, not only as the hoped-for start of his campaign’s next phase, but also as a welcome distraction from the primary in West Virginia. The campaign is girding for a huge loss that it hopes will not provide a comeback storyline for Senator Hillary Clinton’s sagging campaign fortunes.

Mr. Obama’s campaign is altogether trying to ignore the evening, with aides saying he will not give any sort of election night speech, because he is flying on to Michigan where he has events on Wednesday.

Both candidates campaigned across West Virginia on Monday, with Mrs. Clinton’s motorcade driving more than two hours through the winding hills of Appalachia, where she courted a relatively small number of voters in hopes of driving up her expected margin of victory. The Clinton camp believes she could win by as much as 25 points, and Mrs. Clinton is counting on a big victory to impress undecided superdelegates, the party leaders who will most likely decide the nomination.

Mrs. Clinton also wants to show strength in Kentucky and West Virginia — states Democrats have struggled to carry in presidential elections — not to mention, advisers say, pointing up what the Clinton campaign sees as the weakness of the Obama coalition. But advisers acknowledged that even if she won those states by wide margins, it was probably too late to change the dynamic of the nominating contest in her favor.

“Obama is so far ahead at this point, it is hard to see anything we do, even big wins, being a game-changer at this point,” said one senior adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to assess Mrs. Clinton’s political fortunes.

Mrs. Clinton plans to spend the day after the West Virginia primary meeting with advisers and top fund-raisers to discuss the future of the campaign. Aides said they believed she was likely to remain in the race until the Kentucky primary next Tuesday.

Obama advisers see that day, when Oregon also votes, as the unofficial end of the primary season; they plan to declare victory then by stating that they have locked up a majority of the pledged delegates.

Mr. Obama’s remarks at stops in West Virginia and Kentucky on Monday seemed largely geared to the fall campaign, with several critiques of the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, on issues including the economy and Iraq. In Louisville, Ky., on Monday night he praised Mrs. Clinton as a “capable, smart, hard-working, intelligent human being.”

His coming schedule also reflects how his campaign has started to look past Mrs. Clinton. On Wednesday, he is headed to Macomb County, Mich., an area that has long been synonymous with so-called Reagan Democrats. Michigan is a state that aides to Mr. McCain see as highly competitive, given the number of blue-collar workers there and Mr. Obama’s difficulties in winning support from those voters in the primaries.

Michigan — along with Florida — held its primary in defiance of Democratic Party rules, so Mr. Obama did not campaign or build up an organization there. Mr. Obama’s aides have been quick to say that his schedule does not reflect a view that the primary contest with Mrs. Clinton is over, noting that he is also going to Oregon this weekend. But they left no doubt that they were concerned with the head start Mr. McCain is getting in the general election campaign and did not want to leave him unattended.

“Our schedule reflects the fact that we are still fighting for votes and delegates in the remaining contests, but also that we are going to places that are going to be competitive in the fall,” said an Obama spokesman, Bill Burton.

In Charleston on Monday, Mr. Obama pursued a dual strategy on the stump: He criticized Mr. McCain, whose campaign was happy to engage in a daylong exchange of e-mail messages with the Obama team, and sought to dampen expectations by predicting a loss to Mrs. Clinton in the state’s primary on Tuesday.

“I think there is no doubt that Senator Clinton is favored to win,” he said at the news conference in South Charleston, where a local television reporter asked him about voters who may think he is “un-American.”

“Hopefully they’ll watch your program tonight,” he said. “They’ll know that I’m a practicing Christian. They’ll know that my grandfather fought in World War II and I was raised to love America.”